Max Headroom and the World of Pseudo-CGI (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Max Headroom and the World of Pseudo-CGI (2013)

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181 pointsMichelangelo1194 comments

This article is missing any clips of Max Headroom so here is one, an interview with Max on the Wogan chat show in 1985

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f_hWGCsY1g

The effects were great for the time, and done in real time, allowing Max to ad-lib

And the Max Headroom style was notably copied for the Back To The Future 2 "80s Cafe" scene, with Max Headroom style version of Reagan, Michael Jackson and Ayatollah Khomeini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAEU-Lf60LA

Exhibit #infinity for why this movie and the first installment are so god damn great

and the angular robot makeup reminds me of Stan Winston's work in HeartBeeps (1981).

That's a classic I haven't thought of in ages

Also receives an homage by Eminem in the video for Rap God

https://youtu.be/XbGs_qK2PQA

1.4 B views! probably more than Max ever got...

Who could forget the Signal Hijacking in 1987?

On the night of November 22, 1987, the television signals of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, were hijacked, briefly sending a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume to thousands of home viewers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking

It is mentioned in the article, talking about a budget imitation of a budget imitation of CGI.

And his manner of speaking is an inspiration for the iconic voice of SHODAN from System Shock, though SHODAN removes all the comedy and dials up the terror to 11

Example: https://youtu.be/5iZMD_eCpEo?feature=shared

Ronald Reagan... the actor?!

Pfft, OP will be telling me next Jerry Lewis is vice-president, and Jane Wyman first lady

It's the followup line that got me on a recent rewatch. For context Marty is trying to show a video, played back on a futuristic camcorder, and The Doc is more amazed by the camera.

"This is truly amazing, a portable television studio. No wonder your president has to be an actor, he's gotta look good on television."

I kind of got vibes of this AI video using streaming king Asmongold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjoYy5IVtfo

I don't get it. It looks like an actor in a plastic outfit. Is this is a computer program responding to voice or controls?

To me the Psudeo-CGI or straight up non CGI effects have more character. Is it intentional or just "found" I don't know, but I always feel like there's more of a unique look to them.

Straight CG still looks more often than not, too clean (even if trying to look dirty), too polished, too uniform, no character, and just feels like CGI for CGIs sake. Something feels lost and while I expected it to get better over time, I don't feel like it has gotten better.

CGI effects are inevitably samey because any generation of them all get built on the same few tools from the same few vendors, largely by artists and animators trained to approach those tools in the same way, often chasing the mark established in the last big breakthrough hit and whatever new technological innovations it was built on.

Meanwhile, practical and hybrid effects have a much wider palette of material and techniques leverage hundreds of years of diversity and maturity in craft technique, and leave plenty of room for lead artists to apply their own personal creative signature.

We can assume CGI will eventually merge into that latter pool, but that won't happen until technological innovation plateaus and artists turn focus to clever innovations in technique and style instead.

It all comes down to lots of greebles and people who see a CD-rack and think 'that would actually make a really cool skyscraper for this dystopian cityscape I'm making'¹.

1: I think that happened with Bladerunner (1982).

I mean you see a combination of cgi and practical (puppet/rubber applicae and masks) in some of the newer disney+ star wars stuff (and some stuff that is both, grogu is primarily a puppet but they do some cgi work on top to 'sweeten' him). I think generally a toss-up as to what looks worse from a reality comparison perspective, however I think the practical work in starwars taps into a lot of the nostalgia and legacy from the first three movies and ends up being more 'accepted' by that audience.

Other blockbusters have followed suit on this re-adoption of practical effects as well, the new Dungeons and Dragons movie used quite a bit of practical effects in their creature work as well.

This could not be further from the truth. Reality is almost the exact opposite from what you are saying. Practical effects are severely limited and if you look at movies in the 80s and 90s you can see the exact same model + foam + air brush + balsa wood breaking + cocoa for dirt + mist canon in one shot after the next.

Meanwhile in modern times you are watching movies where virtually every shot is somewhere between subtly modified to mostly CG and you don't notice. Then people see one awkward shot out of 400 and declare that "practical effects are better".

Watch batman returns to see a high budget comic book movie before modern film making and compare that to the summer block busters from today.

I don't think "all CGI looks the same" has been any more true for games/movies/tv than "all [things] look the same" style-wise was before (consider sci-fi aesthetics by decade, say - how many Star Trek copycats, how many Alien copycats, etc). And obviously the limitations of practical effects are HUGE - Star Wars broke a lot of ground here, and yet looking at a movie from 5 years later, Wrath of Khan, we see very limited model movement and "action". Or compare TNG space action with even the primitive CGI of Babylon 5.

Wind Waker was one of the first obvious examples in the 3d-rendered-game world; the Spiderverse movies are probably the most widely-seen cultural example of breaking with existing styles. The "feathering" effect of some of the surfaces/fur and such in the commercials for The Wild Robot is another that I remember seen recently.

There's a lot of copy-catting, but not really in a "limits of the process of making CGI" way anymore.

Back in the 90s in the post-Jurassic Park TV/film landscape, it wasn’t common for similar CGI models to appear in waves, e.g., multiple shows with the same variations of janky CGI dinosaurs. My guess was that a VFX shop, having created a model did the hard sell to multiple sci-fi producers to try to get as much profit out of the initial work as possible.

My guess was that a VFX shop, having created a model did the hard sell to multiple sci-fi producers to try to get as much profit out of the initial work as possible.

This or anything like it never happened and never came close to being considered for multiple reasons, including that the vfx studio wouldn't technically own that asset and that the model itself wouldn't be the most difficult part of the process.

What actually happened was that after a huge success like jurassic park, dinosaurs were hot and more dinosaur projects were made.

Reuse of starship models certainly happened in SF shows and movies. There’s a big fleet battle in Serenity with IIRC some Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek models in the background, and I think the Serenity and one or two Star Trek ships found their way into fleet shots in Battlestar Galactica.

What you're talking about is the same studio reusing assets that they made and have saved to fill in the background.

This is common, but that isn't the same as selling your hero assets to someone else and having them use them as a hero asset, which is what the other person was guessing happened.

One of the first commenters addressed this [1] with a pretty fair point of view:

> "There's an apples-to-oranges comparison going on because while the majority of hand-drawn/made/oldschool animation and effects which were very ordinary and uncreative have slipped from memory (and are unavailable to view) and we only see the cream/best of a hundred years of those artforms, CG is unfairly and naively compared to it."

That is, most old effects before CGI were crap. We remember fondly those that stood the test of time (like Max Headroom or Blade Runner) precisely because they were good. We forget about the majority that weren't very good.

---

[1] 11 year ago! Wow that article is old, especially given how rapidly tech progresses

Yes. Go find some early Hanna-Barbera, such as Huckleberry Hound. It's like watching a slide show. This was low-budget TV animation, the early years.

I find it interesting that cheap animation went from cell-based hand-drawn animation to CGI over the last 20ish years. It used to be that if you saw something that was computer-animated, it was expensive and care was spent on the whole production. Now, you can assume that if you see traditional 2D cell-based animation that it’s more likely to be a prestige project.

CG still looks more often than not, too clean (even if trying to look dirty), too polished, too uniform, no character, and just feels like CGI for CGIs sake.

The truth is that this is what you notice. Most of the effects fly by and you have no idea. When you see slivers that don't work as well you think of that as 'all cg' and the 'cg look'.

"NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdMAEtLrPSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGPHy3yWE08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oQ1jV859w

Practical effects are naturally real but the wrong thing. Still, when the thing you are making is fantasy, the audience won't know it's wrong.

CGI effects are naturally fake but the right thing.

I think the best example of pseudo CGI are the user interfaces from Star Trek the Next Generation in the late 80s, early 90s.

In the show, every display is supposed to be an interactive digital display, but because such displays didn't exist at the time, they actually faked it using exacto knives and cellophane.

For the 2023 Star Trek Picard show, they actually recreated the Enterprise Bridge, but replaced most of the fake LCARS cutouts with actual OLED screens!

The artist who created the LCARS design talks about it in this video:

https://youtu.be/iRlSQiYnDLI?si=pN6OvmvNeaOO_OmI&t=62

He talks about how actors in the late 90s had no conception of pushing digital buttons, and had to be coaxed into the idea that you could touch a screen rather than a physical control!

We had janky resistive touchscreen cash registers in the 1990s.

The episode Okuda refers to where Marina Sirtis is on the Battle Bridge is the very first episode of TNG "Encounter at Farpoint" which aired in 1987... basically filmed in 1986 - same year the movie Aliens came out

So I got my dates a bit mixed up. They were actually doing this in the mid 80s. Although touchscreen technology had been around for about 2 decades, it was still not very widely used by the general population.

Max Headroom TV series, 2 seasons 14 episodes total is a really great cypherpunk series. If you watch it today, its cypherpunk and 80's nostalgic retro scifi.

Cyberpunk is the gritty near future Blade Runner inspired style of max headroom (which takes place "5 minutes in the future") and the works of William Gibson. Cypherpunks are the gen x people behind things like PGP and Bitcoin. To quote wikipedia: "A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change."

I made a typo.

Should have written cypherpunk (a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech")

No mate, cypherpunk is a totally different scene. Julian Assange was a notable cypherpunk, as were most of the people who have been accused of being Satoshi Nakomoto.

Cyberpunk is the scene you’re looking for.

Yes I made the same typo again _Cyberpunk_.

I really enjoyed the show, but I’d suggest checking out the original TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future first. It provides great context for the series and stands on its own as a unique piece of cyberpunk history. Last time I checked, it was available on YouTube

Totally agree. 20 Minutes introduced the "Operator, get me out of here!" trope that showed up later in The Matrix...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-yQYVf38&t=825s

My parents named their car GPS "Mrs. Wiggins" after a Carol Burnett character.

My wife set her GPS to use a British accent. Following in that tradition, we've named her GPS "Theora".

The first episode of the show is a remake of the original movie, with a different ending in order to springboard the further episodes. While I agree the movie is worth watching, you don't really need to watch it to get the context for the series.

I would say you don’t need the tv show, if you watched the movie. The movie is just superior to the tv show in every way imho.

Favourite bit, as best I remember it.

Edison Carter asks why the cops have busted into some girls apartment and dragged her off:-

Edison: "What's her crime?" (she was in front of a TV)

Cop: (turns over a cushion) "Look! An off-switch. She'll get years for that."

s/cypherpunk/cyberpunk/g

> Of course, if Max had been made using actual CGI he would have ended up as a creaky old relic, rather like the “Money for Nothing” video which came out the year after his debut. Instead, Jankel, Morton and Frewer came up with a genuinely iconic creation that has aged surprisingly well.

Ouch! Just last night, I couldn't sleep and wound up watching a deep dive on youtube regarding the video, one of the original animators even commented on the thread (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHJj25PBIhg)… calling "Money for Nothing" creaky and old is like criticizing 8 bit pixel art for being blocky. Yeesh.

Underrated video. Underrated song.

Knopfler is a magician on the guitar.

Money for Nothing is underrated now? I thought MTV even uses it when they splash their logo. Everyone knows it's great, video as well. I think it's neither underrated nor overrated. It's just rated.

Agree. I associate this song with wandering the halls of home depot, it is Poe's law in a song, indistinguishable from that which it satirizes

(I can't find what podcast it was that tells the story of the band absolutely not wanting to do this video, they hated MTV, "I want my MTV" at the head of the song is sung mockingly, but it's so iconic that MTV co-opted it as their brand - an amazing example of "what you resist persists")

Underrated video? It got a dozen Video Music Award nominations and won two, including "Video of the Year."

Piling on a bit, but it was also the first video they played when they launched MTV Europe.

https://direstraitsblog.com/blog/30-years-ago-money-nothing-...

It was the first CGI music video done by the folks that would do the first CGI TV show. I still have a soft spot for Reboot from my childhood

Reboot has been posted to youtube[1] and twitch according to the notes on that YT page.

In a reddit post on the above[2], I came across information that there is an 8-part documentary[3] on Reboot coming out from September 24th, along with a remaster of the series soon.[4]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyKRWU_Bdvk [country restricted]

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1fcew8l/reboot_the_...

3. https://www.youtube.com/@ReBootRewindDoc/videos

4. https://www.reddit.com/r/ReBoot/comments/1f2ltql/the_d1_deck...

That documentary sounds great, thanks! I hope they cover the remastering process, as I expect the challenges of using 90s 3D data formats on modern computers are nothing to sneeze at.

Old CG has a vibe all its own. Look at the Mind's Eye stuff for good examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35rjDpBHBxw

There are actually some scenes with a proper CGI Max (at least in the British/Channel 4 feature) where Bryce is working on an early demo, which show how this would have looked!

I think the music video actually holds up today, especially compared to some CG even in the 2000s (i.e. The Rock in the Mummy Returns). The 3D world is clean, bright and colorful. Yeah, it's blocky, but that can be seen as a style choice. These characters, microwave ovens, etc. could easily fit into the world of Katamari Damashii [0], for example.

I think Max Headroom was going for a different mood, and that style wouldn't have fit, but the style is perfectly fine in a vacuum.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHsFcSNFUMc

> calling "Money for Nothing" creaky and old is like criticizing 8 bit pixel art for being blocky. Yeesh.

Just tell the kids it's a tribute to Minecraft.

no Minecraft is a tribute to "Money for Nothing"

If I want one thing out of AI (besides not destroying humanity) it would be an old CRT in the corner of my house with an AI Max Headroom I could talk to.

the usual version, or the Chicago version?

Maybe a bit creepy to keep in the house.

I was thinking, could you trust train a modern LLM with content meant to emulate Max's personality (not sure if there's enough content just from the shows), plus synchronized blocky animation to generate Max Headroom?

honestly I don't need Max to summarize wikipedia pages for me: Non-sequitur jokes with the occasional riff on something I said would feel real enough.

They did it with Seinfeld "Nothing, Forever" [0]

It should be easier with Max... what a great idea someone has to do this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfmTofQLL0

wait... this might be possible to do...

Let's not forget that behind all this was actor -- including the improv and adlibs -- Matt Frewer.

Apparently 1.9 meters tall which is a bit ironic considering how small the screens generally were back in those days. :)

But less ironic if you consider the character's name.

And most of those old panels on spaceships etc were just gel printed, often with hand-applied Letraset etc

https://propstoreauction.com/lot-details/index/catalog/347/l...

I understand that Commodore Amiga (e.g. visual effects) was also used for the Max Headroom series [1][2].

If we go backwards, probably new generations think that Star Wars was also done using CGI.

[1] https://network47.org/vault/max-headroom/max-headroom-and-th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom

I think this was posted here in the past year but why not... how the Windows 10 wallpaper is, in fact, not a computer graphic. https://youtu.be/ewmXizBqjl0?si=ME-US9M5PgQcF4dH

Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439515 - May 2024 (268 comments)

Sounds like the flyby of the HBO logo, to introduce features. Another example of when they knew they wanted a CGI look, but was still cheaper to build it physically. Edit: see below!

Sci-fi Interfaces is a good source of similar content

https://scifiinterfaces.com/

Max headroom used to scare the shit out of me when I was a kid. I think they used him in an ad campaign, and I just remember people talking about the show but not understanding it and then seeing it occassionally and being totally freaked out.

But then again The Young Ones also scared me because there's one where Neil drives a nail through his foot or something.

>I think they used him in an ad campaign

They did, for Pepsi.

Related to the idea of pseudo-CGI (in which practical effects are trying to look like computer graphics) was the 1970s/1980s mechanical games like "Digital Derby" that were made to look pixelated for no reason other than to make it look like the crude graphics of video games of the time.

https://toytales.ca/digital-derby-from-tomy-1978/

arcade games worked on the same idea (mechanical) and had some pretty next level setups in the arcade- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedSuvlFElo

True, but I guess what I was trying to say is that things like Digital Derby were trying to look electronic when they didn't have to -- the mechanical/electromechanical arcade games of the 1960s/early 1970s were more realistic visually than most video games were until the last couple of decades.

Great video on why Max Headroom is wildly missunderstood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsDrXc94NGU

Similarly, those of us who cannot afford high-end AI have to use Photoshop to fake the AI look for our memes, like gluing extra toes on people.

Reminds me of this short-lived (and IIRC pretty goofy) TV series that nevertheless somehow indelibly implanted itself into my teenage computer nerd brain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automan

Lots of Pseudo-CGI there too (along with some rudimentary real CGI).

Today's pseudo-CGI effects are the distortions Youtubers apply to stock shots. The dust-and-scratches insertion filter, the camera-jitter insertion filter, the sprocket area visible filter, the sepia tone filter, fake analog TV noise, fake zoom and pan... Usually narrated by a neckbeard with an oversized microphone.

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng

(SD unfortunately but then it is old - impressive amount of model building to achieve something that would be a CGI nobrainer today)

Miniatures are still in use in Hollywood! The weathering in your video reminded me of the storytelling from Weta in this Blade Runner BTS (which they call "big-atures"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLxxbfsj8IM

Whoa, this is so neat! Stunning level of detail, a shame it's not even full SD and so fuzzy. :)

What really put me over the top was the reveal for how the Stargate Effect works.

I remember this as a kid, but kid memories forget about how janky the motion was. I'm assuming that was the best attempt at it too.

Huh. I was just telling a workmate about Max Headroom yesterday. It would be neat to have a Max Headroom filter for Zoom (would use a video background as a starting point except for zoom's lack of video backgrounds on Linux)

More Tron (1982). Nearly any scene with humans in it is mat paintings and then hand masking of live action.

https://youtu.be/sbgHMrLPQrE?t=2928

Thanks, I was unaware of Annabel Jankel, sister of Chaz Jankel.

https://youtu.be/uf0JKWSLd3I

Honorable mention in the same league: 'Wynnona's Big Brown Beaver' videoclip from Primus.

I've been really hoping someone makes an OBS plug-in to simulate the Max Headroom stutter.

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